Whose Fish?

I'm not big fan of puzzles, i did go thro' same old crap for infy, but i do recollect solving this puzzle *supposedly* created by Albert Einstein and said that 98% of the people in the world could not figure it out. Trick to solve is to *visualize*, for those like me, you can write and cut the paper. Save paper, save trees, save earth :)

There are five houses in a row in different colors. In each house lives a person with a different nationality. The five owners drink a different drink, smoke a different brand of cigar and keep a different pet, one of which is a fish.

Hints:

1. The Brit lives in the red house.
2. The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
3. The Dane drinks tea.
4. The green house is on the left of the white house.
5. The green house owner drinks coffee.
6. The person who smokes Pall Malls keeps birds.
7. The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhills.
8. The man living in the house right in the center drinks milk.
9. The man who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats.
10. The Norwegian lives in the first house.
11. The man who keeps horses lives next to the one who smokes Dunhills.
12. The owner who smokes Bluemasters drinks beer.
13. The German smokes Princes.
14. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
15. The man who smokes Blends has a neighbor who drinks water.

Who owns the fish ???

A key logger

Many came to me asking how a key logger will go undetected with all these security options. I think it may be due to the fact that AV scanners look for known keylogger signatures and if i happen to write and build one, it may not be able to find it. Here is source code of a simple key logger written in VB, tell me if it goes undetected in your AV scan. But this is just a payload, how you infect the client and transmit data out of the client is where the fun is.

<< i support white hat >>

TinTin

Long gone those days, life is fun and free of bs work. I had lot of fun time watching TinTin series those days and probably made me one of those ardent fans, last week i started googling for TinTin series and caught the link, it has dvd rip of "The Adventures of TinTin [complete season 1-3]" and get all srt subrips here.

Make sure all parts are available for each divx file before downloading thro' rapidshare link checker. You can opt to leech from many unsecured wifi next door or have patience in downloading from rapidshare with its time limitations.

Lean, Agile, and Extreme Programming

Jokes apart, if you are interested in learning yet another process copied from manufacturing to software industry, here is a article on Lean, Agile, and Extreme Programming. Couple of years back i have seen advantages with couple of XP tools, peer programming and TDD which we used informally or to be precise w/o even knowing what is XP [Here is some literature on XP link1 link2]. Spending some time googling on lean s/w development brings back memories of how we used to appreciate tools from toyota prod system like poka-yoke, smed, u-cell,... I'd been more happy if i had sticked on to manufacturing domain, if not for C++ and mirage of fat paycheck.

... more free movies ...

TamilTerminal.net

Here is link to another movie site to download latest tamil movies for free, some with divx quality. Many english movie links are dead i haven't checked out other lang sections

here is a link dump site, here is one for english.

Simple way to catch movie links out there, get into a share digger like shareminer.com or megadownload.net, type in the movie name, you should be all set to watch the movie in a day.

N'joy :)

Watermark photo date and time

I wanted to superimpose the picture taken date in the photo's saved from my digital camera, i don't know if i really read thro' the digital camera manual, this doesn't seem to be possible, so after a while had some fun with coding (Ahem... Ctrl-C / Ctrl-V code stitching)

This utility reads the picture information available as EXIF attribute and stamps a watermark in the photo, now i can print those with the date and time on the photo.

Needs .net 2.0 framework, copy jpg's to folder where exe is located and run the binary or you can prefer to pass the folder path as cmd-line argument.
WARNING: Doesn't implement Lossless JPEG Transforms, so image resolution will degrade, shouldn't be a big problem if you are planning to print 5-by-7 and not a poster.

Pls feel free to extend the source to a full fledged app with decent user interface and implement lossless jpeg transformation.

Update 4/28: Some more code stitching and got the windows app interface for the same core logic, find the application and source.

Online Suryan FM, Sun Tv, K Tv, ...

Long expected and finally now its here, listen to Suryan FM Chennai live in online. Hmm lets wait for Radio Mirchi's answer.

As a side note, watch free stream of Sun Tv, K Tv & Vijay TV online @ isaitamil.net . Also here is
link to Mahabharatham (தமிழ்) from rajshri.com

இனிய தமிழ் புத்தாண்டு வாழ்த்துக்கள

Sivaji mp3 with ID3 lyrics

Sivaji mp3 with ID3 lyrics for iPod/WMP/...

.NET and statistic calculations

Today i had to calculate 99th percentile and slope and forecast. I was hoping .net may have something or i should be able to get some open source, but after couple of hours of search i was not able to find anything.

I decided to write my own component and got some java pseudo-code using koders.com and wrote one, here is VB.net code to compute nth percentile, i was too lazy to go back and study statistics literature and client gave me the logic for slope and forecast calculation. (Thanks Terry!)


PS: During this process, we figured out the percentile calculation in Excel is not statistically accurate.

Update 2/10/07: Let me share some of the common code i wrote in last few months. Unlike Microsoft enterprise library or application blocks these were written with some assumptions and simplicity in mind, so don't expect this to be feature rich. If you find any bug/issue with code leave a note. Compressed file has a data access layer component, common routines used for web and desktop, authorization component for web; all code written in .net 2.0

NTFS & Knoppix Live OS. A deadly combination.

Last week my laptop crashed and after multiple tries i was not able to recover the OS and decided to reinstall OS, but i recovered data booting from Knoppix Live OS. Hell with NTFS protection, i figured out anyone with a live OS may be able to boot from it and mount the NTFS file system and copy any file from it, only consoling thing was Knoppix mounted drive as read-only system, so much for NTFS security :-(